I accept that you and most people here think this aproach is not helpfull. I will therefor abandon it. However you said that there are various other things wrong with my reasoning even if the aproach was not generally bad. Is my general process of asigning probabilities to believes wrong? Would the thing I did in the following paragraph also be wrong in an abstract scenario, where I would for example want to differentiate between blue and red balls instead of someone having a crush on me or not?
″ If however this person gives the response with 100% Chance to a Person he/she has a crush on, but also with 50% chance to a person he/she just likes as a friend, then this signal will only help me differentiate between the states “friend” and “love intrest” with 50% probability. And now it becomes relevant on how many of his/her friends this person has a crush.
Let us say the person has 10 friends and has a crush on 5 of them. Than on average he/she would give 5 correct positive signals 2.5 false positive signals and 2.5 correct negative signals. So if I get a positive signal, than that means that with a probability of 2⁄3 that person would have a crush on me and with a probability of 1⁄3 he/she would not.”
My claim is that your model is far too simple to model the complexities of human attraction.
Let’s use your example of pulling red and blue balls from an urn. Consider an urn with ten blue balls and five red balls. In a “classical” universe, you would expect to draw a red ball from this urn one time in three. A simple probabilistic model works here.
In a “romantic” universe, the individual balls don’t have colours yet. They’re in an indeterminate state. They may have tendencies towards being red or blue, but if you go to the urn and say “based on previous observations of people pulling balls out of this urn, the ball I’m about to pull out should be red one third of the time”, they will almost always be blue. Lots of different things you might do when sampling a ball from the urn might change its colour.
In such a universe, it would be very hard to model coloured balls in an urn. As far as people being attracted to other people are concerned, we live in such a universe.
My claim is that your model is far too simple to model the complexities of human attraction.
Probably. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be modelled. Or are you instead claiming that it shouldn’t be modelled?
The first can be remedied by better models—and starting with a simple approximate model surely isn’t a bad first step. The latter can’t be fixed by modelling obviously.
I accept that you and most people here think this aproach is not helpfull. I will therefor abandon it. However you said that there are various other things wrong with my reasoning even if the aproach was not generally bad. Is my general process of asigning probabilities to believes wrong? Would the thing I did in the following paragraph also be wrong in an abstract scenario, where I would for example want to differentiate between blue and red balls instead of someone having a crush on me or not?
″ If however this person gives the response with 100% Chance to a Person he/she has a crush on, but also with 50% chance to a person he/she just likes as a friend, then this signal will only help me differentiate between the states “friend” and “love intrest” with 50% probability. And now it becomes relevant on how many of his/her friends this person has a crush.
Let us say the person has 10 friends and has a crush on 5 of them. Than on average he/she would give 5 correct positive signals 2.5 false positive signals and 2.5 correct negative signals. So if I get a positive signal, than that means that with a probability of 2⁄3 that person would have a crush on me and with a probability of 1⁄3 he/she would not.”
I haven’t yet abandoned this approach and I’m not sure you should do so either. At least not until some more comments on this topic have come in.
My claim is that your model is far too simple to model the complexities of human attraction.
Let’s use your example of pulling red and blue balls from an urn. Consider an urn with ten blue balls and five red balls. In a “classical” universe, you would expect to draw a red ball from this urn one time in three. A simple probabilistic model works here.
In a “romantic” universe, the individual balls don’t have colours yet. They’re in an indeterminate state. They may have tendencies towards being red or blue, but if you go to the urn and say “based on previous observations of people pulling balls out of this urn, the ball I’m about to pull out should be red one third of the time”, they will almost always be blue. Lots of different things you might do when sampling a ball from the urn might change its colour.
In such a universe, it would be very hard to model coloured balls in an urn. As far as people being attracted to other people are concerned, we live in such a universe.
Probably. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be modelled. Or are you instead claiming that it shouldn’t be modelled?
The first can be remedied by better models—and starting with a simple approximate model surely isn’t a bad first step. The latter can’t be fixed by modelling obviously.